The Uncanny Origins of
Trump’s Impeachment
After multiple late-night marathon sessions, the U.S. House stood at the precipice of impeaching America’s forty-fifth president, Donald J. Trump. The chamber bore all the markings of solemnity—the marble walls, the parliamentary formality, and the endless reverential talk about the U.S. Constitution. But the gravity of America’s most famous political scandal, Watergate, seemed lacking. In fact, the moment unfolding in Washington several days before Christmas 2019 seemed much more like daily politics than the rare rebuke that the Founding Fathers had envisioned impeachment to be.1
Much of America had already tuned out from the hearings, despite the potentially historic consequences. On the House floor, nerves were frayed and voices were hoarse. For the third time in America’s history, one of its chief executives was going to be stained by impeachment. Majority Democrats had the votes.2
As the drama inside the Capitol wound down, Representative Doug Collins, a bespectacled Republican from Georgia, dutifully stepped to the microphone for one last shot at informing history. His words, however partisan, provided a succinct summary of what the country had endured for three tiresome years.3
“I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: I do not believe, no matter what was said today and even what has been said, this is not a solemn occasion,” Collins barked.4
The congressman continued:
When you go looking for something for three years, and especially this year, since January, you ought to be excited when you found it… Why do we keep calling this a solemn occasion when you’ve been wanting to do this ever since the gentleman was elected?5
Collins’ statement was painfully and obviously true. From the moment the billionaire bad boy Donald Trump had emerged as a viable prospect to become president in the spring of 2016, his opponents in the Democratic Party, inside the machinery of the FBI and Justice Department, around the government bureaucracy, amongst foreign allies, and inside the never-Trump wing of his own Republican Party. They threw the kitchen sink at him, to first derail his campaign and, when that failed, to cripple his presidency.6
The mission was accurately summed up in a private exchange between two FBI lovebirds who played an essential role in this effort. “We’ll stop it,” then-counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok texted bureau lawyer Lisa Page, clearly referring to Trump’s election in 2016.7
Facts, accuracy, rule of law, and normal bureaucratic and parliamentary processes took a backseat. The political outcome was more important.8
As has now been well established, the Trump opposition campaign started with a research project funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). These actors hired a research intelligence firm known as Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to produce a now-infamous dossier painting a portrait of a Trump campaign colluding with Russia to steal the election.9
Though assiduous efforts were made to leak this tainted opposition research, there were no takers at the time in the press. It took some artful machinations on the part of then-FBI director James Comey and his allies in the intelligence community to bring the dossier to light and make it public—a political espionage effort known as “Spygate.”10
The opposition campaign kicked into high gear with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which failed to find evidence of collusion and then pivoted to make a case for obstruction of justice. When Mueller’s evidence failed to meet the threshold for prosecution in the eyes of Attorney General William Barr, the campaign shifted to a new attack fueled by an anonymous whistleblowing bureaucrat who alleged that Trump had tried to leverage Ukraine to start an investigation of Joe Biden, his likely 2020 rival, by withholding U.S. aid to the former Soviet republic.11
After a notably rushed and nakedly partisan hearing, Trump was impeached in the House and then acquitted by the Senate in a matter of weeks, both on party-line votes. Four House Democrats broke ranks and decided not to vote with their party. Just one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, did the same.12
It is hard to find a winner in the aftermath of that three-year, vitriolic rollercoaster ride. The country’s deep partisan wounds are packed with painful salt. Attention and appreciation for the historic progress of the U.S. economy (among other things worth celebrating) had been completely diverted, and American trust in essential institutions like the FBI, the Congress, and the media has been deeply, perhaps fatally compromised.13
Meanwhile, the true victor in this sordid episode resides thousands of miles away in Moscow, where the seeds of this profound domestic discord were first sown several years earlier.14
The old Soviet hands who developed the Cold War strategy of sowing division probably never imagined a scenario quite like this one. With just a few twenty-first century interventions—$150,000 in Facebook ads, a few thousand hacked emails, a couple of energy power plays, and some classic disinformation—Russia had all but paralyzed its American adversary for three long years.15
In short, Russia succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. But even this does not explain the actual goals of Vladimir Putin’s campaign. Lost in all the partisan hysteria about Trump’s presumed relationship to Putin is the question of what Putin hoped to gain from it.16 Did he really think that he could influence the outcome of an American election?
Yes, the Russian government has an interest in destabilizing American politics and miring its leadership in pointless partisan strife.17 But given the absurdity of the case against Trump, many Americans sense that we are not being told the whole story. Something else is going on. Why is this really happening, and why does the same cast of characters from the Clinton-Obama “Deep State” keep popping up in this divisive theatrical drama?
In order to understand the actual roots of impeachment, we have to view it in the larger context of Putin’s longterm strategic goals and interests—particularly, as it turns out, his interest in the U.S. uranium industry.18
This, then, is the story of the real Russian collusion, and it begins, as it must, with Vladimir Putin and his quest to return Russia to glory. It is a complex story that has never been fully explained. But without it, we cannot understand what is happening in American politics today.19
In this book, we are going to fully unpack the Obama-era scandal known as Uranium One. First exposed in Peter Schweizer’s 2015 bestseller Clinton Cash, this underplayed scandal turns out to be the tip of an iceberg of corruption and subterfuge by Putin and his surrogates in the American uranium and nuclear-powered utility industries. The latter, as we will show, was an industry with which President Barack Obama had deep ties going back to his days as an Illinois state senator.20
This book reveals the larger story behind that scandal and explains its hidden links to the subsequent political attacks on Trump, including spying on his campaign, the Mueller probe, and the Trump-Ukraine impeachment scandal.
First, however, we have to understand the motives, the training, and the tactics of the wily, hidden actor behind these machinations.
The basic facts of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power are well known. From a young KGB spy living in East Germany, he rose to become the head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, and eventually the ruler of Russia.21
Along the way, he became experienced in asymmetrical “cold warfare.” He became an expert in compromising his opponents through corrupt financial deals. He also learned how to keep his rivals (and lieutenants), whose insolence was a recurring theme, in order.22
Our story begins in 2000, when Putin ascended to the Russian presidency. At that time, the former Soviet empire was in ruins. The Cold War had, by 1991, crushed the U.S.S.R. and changed the entire eastern European landscape. One by one, all fifteen Soviet republics split off to become independent nations.23
Unlike previous Soviet leaders, Putin was not a Marxist ideologue but a ruthless pragmatist. Yet he was also a nationalist and super-patriot who dreamed of rebuilding the empire that had been the goal of every Russian ruler since Peter the Great, whom Putin idolized. For Putin, this meant primarily recapturing or regaining control over Georgia and Ukraine and the Baltic “republics,” as well as Crimea and other former Soviet states.24
Since the post-Soviet state was economically and militarily decimated, Putin knew that he had to get creative. Like many great rulers before him, he used every tool in his grubby, broken-down toolbox to once again command respect and fear.25
After the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin’s administration had made diplomatic inroads with the U.S. under President Bill Clinton—ties that Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, tried to maintain as hopes kindled for a long-term future of friendly relations with Moscow. History will likely show that such optimism was misplaced, overlooking both Putin’s ambitions and the inevitable consolidation of Russia’s major industries by a handful of politically connected billionaires—a shadowy group known as “the oligarchs.”26
The rise of the oligarchs began before 1990 under the chaotic restructuring of the Soviet economy known as Perestroika. This kleptocratic rise accelerated during Yeltsin’s privatization era and continued after Putin’s election in 2000.27
The Americans had wistfully embraced Perestroika and privatization as the paths toward fashioning a free market-based, democratic society in Russia. But Putin seized it for a far different opportunity: creating a Soviet-style oligarchy dominated by a handful of industrialists whom he could both enrich and exploit in pursuit of his ultimate goal: to rebuild Russia’s empire through the control of global energy resources.28
By 2006, Putin had begun his march toward regional (and nuclear) domination when he formed his state-owned atomic umbrella corporation, Rosatom.29
The post–Cold War thaw had all but evaporated. The five-day Russian military conflict in 2008 with neighboring Georgia, a key American ally, dashed any remaining hopes inside the Bush administration for a permanent rapprochement with Russia.30
Georgia had declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and its relations with Russia remained tense because of two Russian separatist communities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In summer 2008, the Russian military invaded Georgia to take temporary control of the separatist communities. This move forced thousands of non-Russian Georgians to flee before a ceasefire was reached five days later. Eventually, the Russians withdrew, having forever changed the balance of power in the separatist regions.31
Putin made it clear that fateful week in August 2008 that he was willing to use military force to meddle in, or outright annex, regions in former Soviet republics that housed large numbers of Russian-separatist populations. The muted response from the West—including a lack of NATO action—only heightened Putin’s confidence, as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lamented in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed on the tenth anniversary of the Georgian military crisis.32
“We could not deter Moscow in this case. But we did act, and Georgia survived. It is still a sad story,” she wrote, “and perhaps Putin did take the wrong lessons from it.”33
Putin indeed learned and recalibrated. He understood that military interventions, like those in Georgia in 2008 (and later Ukraine in 2014), could only be used in limited circumstances under the guise of protecting Russian separatists. Further military invasions risked demonizing him and unifying the West and its NATO alliance against him. Over time, Putin switched tactics. He resumed the tried-and-true method of pursuing his neo-imperialist agenda by leveraging Russia’s vast energy resources as a geopolitical weapon.34
Putin instinctively saw Russia’s vast natural energy resources as a competitive edge—whether within Russia or in the former Soviet states. Putin, like many Russian leaders before him, leveraged Russia’s energy resources to reward his friends and punish his enemies.35
Through the corrupt privatization of Russia’s energy assets and subsequent crony adventures, Putin, his immediate family, and dozens of his closest oligarchs have amassed staggering sums totaling in the tens—or perhaps hundreds—of billions of dollars. An incalculable amount of money was laundered and then stashed in secret accounts all over the world.36
Putin also used energy policy as a strategic weapon to threaten his geopolitical friends and foes. Putin has strong-armed entire nations through lopsided energy deals, such as the ones that left neighboring Ukraine so dependent on Russian gas supplies that Kiev was essentially powerless against the invasion of Crimea in 2014. His blatant self-enrichment schemes and blood-soaked crackdowns on dissent are equally alarming.37
Putin’s power play began with natural gas, a bountiful commodity in Russia that was essential to survive the cold, harsh winters that grip many of the former Soviet republics. Moscow had both the supply and the pipeline distribution system to make its neighbors dependent on Russian gas, which gave Putin the sort of leverage he sought.38
Within a few years, Putin expanded the economic battlefield to include the fuel powering commercial nuclear reactors. Uranium was a logical extension. This is where the U.S. comes in.39
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush’s administration crafted a novel program that incentivized Russia and the other Soviet republics to dismantle their nuclear weapons and convert the uranium from their warheads into peaceful reactor fuel to be bought by American utilities. The senior Bush announced the so-called “Megatons to Megawatts” program in summer 1992, and Bill Clinton formally implemented it the following year. The well-intentioned program empowered Russia to corner a portion of the American energy supply, but, after two decades, Russia’s nuclear profits were in jeopardy when the program was poised to sunset in 2013.40
In 2008, while the United States was mired in the all-consuming Iraq and Afghan wars, and its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Putin and his team secretly began to implement a multiyear plan for the nuclear energy company, Rosatom, to dominate the global uranium market.41
As part of Putin’s plan, Rosatom created a U.S. shell company (Tenam) to spread goodwill in the form of millions of dollars in gifts, investments, and contracts to American political elites (and to hopefully acquire raw uranium assets in Kazakhstan and the United States). He also used the old KGB tactic of exploiting compromising information—or kompromat—to entrap some Americans into corruption. One of the prized assets the company acquired was a nondescript Canadian mining company known as Uranium One.42
What no one foresaw was that Putin’s nuclear domination scheme would set in motion a decade of cascading political scandals that would stain Democrats and Republicans alike, including the impeachment of America’s forty-fifth president. The unlikely dominoes, falling one after the other, exposed just how readily America’s ruling classes could be bought, just how easily the U.S. intelligence community could be manipulated by inaccurate information like the Steele dossier, and just how unexpectedly American nuclear security could be compromised.43
The seemingly disconnected chain of events leading from the Uranium One scandal to the more recent efforts to take down President Trump came into focus in 2018, shortly after the Democrats made their bombshell revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC had paid for the notorious Steele dossier. This discredited document wove a deceptive tale of Trump-Putin collusion that unleashed a full FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign and his early presidency.44
The unlikely origins of America’s latest standoff with Russia trace back to Obama’s November 2008 victory. The forty-fourth president was ushered in by a wave of whimsical hope and shattered one of the last glass ceilings in American politics. The upbeat mantras of “Hope and Change” and “Yes We Can” had sparked an irrepressible optimism inside the Democratic national security establishment. They believed that many of the world’s most vexing problems—from Iran to Russia—could be solved by negotiation, reason, and dialogue rather than the strategy of confrontation and warfare embraced by the military-industrial establishment and neoconservative darlings like John McCain, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.45
Obama’s new national security team was certain that it could reset relations with Moscow after the Georgia crisis, especially with Putin ceding the Russian presidency (temporarily, as it turned out) to a youthful and seemingly Western-friendly politician named Dmitry Medvedev.46
In February 2009, Vice President Joe Biden was the first to proclaim the administration’s desire to “press the reset button” with Russia. Obama’s National Security Council (NSC) advisor Michael McFaul (who later served as Obama’s Ambassador to Russia) was the architect of the policy, and Hillary Clinton, as the new Secretary of State, was named to quarterback the reset. Clinton infamously pressed a literal red button in a March 2009 meeting with Putin’s chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov. The PR stunt made headlines when Lavrov informed Clinton that she “got it wrong” and used the incorrect Russian word on the “reset” label (McFaul was apparently to blame for the shoddy translation).47
Over the next three years, Team Obama pursued policies designed to prop up the Medvedev regime and assist Russia’s economy. They facilitated the creation of a Silicon Valley–like city called the Skolkovo Innovation Center. They approved the sale of Uranium One to the Russians. And they replaced the Megatons to Megawatts program with billions of dollars of new guaranteed uranium sales to American utilities.48
Medvedev, it turns out, was only a political front man for Putin and not the crusading reformer that the Obama administration had assumed. Under the reset, Medvedev was able to advance Putin’s agenda—all under the guise of diplomacy. Among the concessions that the Obama administration made were the following:
· Scrapping plans for missile defense in Europe.
· Slashing U.S. strategic nuclear defense capabilities.
· Surrendering substantial American uranium assets.
· Signing off on billions in new nuclear utility contracts.
· Transferring Silicon Valley technology to the Kremlin.
As it turns out, all of these items were high priorities on Putin’s wish list.
Thus, Obama’s reset weakened the United States while advancing Putin’s plan for domination of global uranium markets and strengthening Russia’s economy with new business and technology.49
By the time that Rosatom’s corrupt activities were exposed by an undercover FBI operative named William Douglas Campbell—a crucial behind-the-scenes player whom we will meet later on—it was already too late. Putin had already usurped all that he wanted and returned to military aggression, this time invading the Crimean region of Ukraine in 2014.50
Before the reset was exposed as a failure, though, the crafty Putin had managed to compromise numerous Americans. For example, one of the main U.S. trucking companies entrusted with transporting uranium to nuclear energy facilities was implicated in a Russian bribery scheme. Along the way, several U.S. nuclear utilities (and their unwitting customers) became dependent on Russia’s cheap fuel supply (not to mention the American lobbyists and consultants who raked in millions from Kremlin interests).51
Bill Clinton took a $500,000 speech fee in Moscow, and his Clinton Foundation accepted sums in excess of $150 million in cash and in-kind contributions (or commitments) from people and entities directly tied to Russia or the Uranium One transaction. And Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta wound up on the board of a “clean energy company” that got a billion-ruble ($35 million) Russian investment.52
The cloud of foreign deals, missing emails, and peddled influence had already left a suspicious odor around the Clinton Foundation as Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 presidential campaign. The odor became a stench when Putin’s pay-to-play politics was laid bare in 2015 by Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, along with a front-page story in the New York Times.53
The Clintons tried to counter the narrative, claiming that Schweizer’s revelations had been debunked. But the facts unearthed by Clinton Cash remained unassailable, and soon Trump made the Uranium One episode a centerpiece of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks on the campaign trail.54
The “Russian reset” was now a major political liability in the 2016 election, and Clinton’s team needed to neutralize the issue. It was this desire, according to one Clinton insider, that led Democrats to launch a massive multipronged opposition research project in late 2015 aimed at tying Republicans to Russia.55
“We knew Republicans had their own Russia issues and we wanted to get those out there,” the insider told John Solomon in a 2019 interview. The insider said that the research efforts began in a loose, ad hoc way, scouring media articles, creating timelines, and doing basic Google searches like opposition researchers often do. In spring 2016, a DNC contractor took on a more formal effort to organize reporters and activists in Ukraine to look for dirt on longtime GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort.56
A top priority for the Clinton campaign was to investigate Manafort’s past foreign lobbying activities once he became a senior Trump campaign official. (A DNC official updated the Clinton campaign on the progress of the Ukrainian contractor’s efforts, according to a leaked May 2016 email.)57
But the anti-Trump effort became more formal and focused in mid-2016 when Fusion GPS, run by a former journalist named Glenn Simpson, approached the Clinton campaign and the DNC with a significant body of research tying the likely GOP nominee to unsavory figures in Russia and a proposed business deal. Fusion GPS was hired by the Clinton and DNC law firm Perkins Coie, and Simpson brought in the former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, to compile his now-infamous dossier.58
What had started as a political neutralization initiative grew far bigger in early July 2016 when Steele brought his lurid mess of unsubstantiated Trump allegations his FBI handler in London, and then to his friend Bruce Ohr—a high-ranking Justice Department official. Soon, the FBI launched an unprecedented counterintelligence investigation targeting Trump, whose subsequent assertions that he was being “wiretapped” were dismissed as a paranoid delusion, at the time, by the national media.59
Simpson claims that the campaign did not know about Steele’s contact with the FBI until much later, but that some senior campaign officials were briefed by lawyers on some of Steele’s findings in early fall 2016 as the campaign was heating up.60
After the election, the investigation grew bigger (instead of ending after no evidence was found to support the allegations against Trump). It ultimately led to the firing of FBI Director James Comey and gave rise to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Thus ensued a multi-year political drama that paralyzed the Trump presidency at times with relentless media coverage of what often turned out to be baseless conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, Mueller managed to ensnare a number of former Trump campaign officials in his net, leading to several high-profile convictions.61
Prominent Obama intelligence officials like James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan lent their prestige to the Russian collusion narrative (with a steady drumbeat of support from Democrats and the national press). The threat of impeachment was made early and often by attention-seeking Democratic members of Congress like Maxine Waters and Jerry Nadler. Adam Schiff went further and stated that Trump could “face the real prospect of jail time.”62
Even before Mueller released his report, which found no actionable evidence that Trump or his surrogates had colluded with Russia, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (now the president’s hard-charging private attorney) had fatefully turned his attention to the question of whether Democrats had tried to leverage Ukraine to influence the 2016 election or create the false collusion narrative.63
Ukraine, a Russian neighbor, was the place where an explosive document called the “black ledger” surfaced during the height of the 2016 election, forcing Trump’s then-campaign chairman Manafort to resign over allegations that he had collected millions from pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.64
The ledger’s mysterious appearance was suspect from the beginning, but soon became ammunition (along with the Steele dossier) for the Democrats’ Trump-Putin collusion theory. Eventually, Manafort’s former partner, Rick Gates, would tell Mueller’s team that the ledger was a fake. But by that time, the political damage had been done.65
In the end, Giuliani’s relentless efforts to launch an official investigation on issues related to Ukraine prompted the whistleblower complaint in summer 2019 that, in turn, gave rise to the impeachment proceedings against Trump. When the “whistleblower”—an Obama NSC holdover—heard about a phone call that President Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he must have panicked.
Trump and his personal attorney may have been dangerously close to the heart of multiple corruption scandals that occurred under Obama and Biden. The whistleblower filed a formal complaint and coordinated its weaponization with Congressman Schiff’s staffers (more Obama NSC holdovers). Trump was flabbergasted when the whistleblower’s complaint led to impeachment proceedings since he believed that it was “a perfect phone call.” The irony was striking: as with Uranium One in 2016, Trump was seeking to expose corruption and got blasted for it.66
In sum, what started as a straightforward (if typically underhanded) bid by Vladimir Putin for nuclear energy superiority had evolved into a series of full-fledged scandals that posed some of the greatest modern challenges to America’s democracy and its revered institutions, including the FBI, the State Department, and even the presidency.67
The weakening of America and the enrichment of Putin’s cronies during the Obama administration’s Russian reset have significantly altered the geopolitical horizon. The failure by America’s ruling elite to navigate such treacherous waters, and the media’s reckless (albeit unwitting) complicity in obscuring Putin’s plot, allowed the Russian ruler to rebuild his empire. As we will see in the ensuing chapters, these cascading events will have repercussions for decades to come.68
In April 2020, we contacted many of the major players mentioned throughout this book: George Soros, Amos Hochstein, John Podesta, Frank Giustra, Ian Telfer, Eric Ciaramella, Theodore Kassinger, Jose Fernandez, Sean Misko, Abigail Grace, Glenn Simpson, Exelon Corporation, and Fusion GPS (among others). We asked if they would like to shed any light on their side of the story and they were given a fair opportunity to respond to our specific inquiries.
As of this writing, the above parties either declined to respond (or to address our inquiries) or to comment on the record, with one exception: John Podesta. Podesta’s spokesman issued the following statement: “The Uranium One conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked, and John had no involvement with the issue while working in the White House. He does not recall ever discussing the company with his brother or anyone from his firm. John has not had any involvement with the Podesta Group in nearly two decades, and only learned of their work on the subject when it became fodder for baseless political attacks.”
Nonetheless, every claim in this book has been reinforced by more than one hundred pages of citations (including more than 1,200 endnotes citing official government records, primary source documents, and reports from legacy media outlets). Thus, our revelations can easily be reproduced. We stand by our reporting and we are confident that our findings will withstand the most intense scrutiny.